As part of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology’s planned revisions to make our accredited PhD program more accessible to graduate students who cannot afford to come full time to a residency program for several years, we are thinking about offering some of our courses online, so a student could have more flexible timing each week as to when to do the readings, ask questions, etc.

As our regular student enrollment is temporarily low as we switch things around, we may make my course available for outside people to audit. The cost, payable to ITP, is $754 to audit. There is also a possible option to take the course online for credit at a tuition fee of $1200, although whether some other institution would accept this for units in their program….that’s unknown to me at this time.

I’m trying to get a feel for who and how many people would be interested, which will have some effect on whether we offer it on line. Since this is a graduate level course, I want to keep it small, ideally something like 8-12 ITP credit students and half a dozen or so auditors.

I don’t have the details worked out yet as to exactly how I will teach this, but I’ve posted a syllabus from the last time I taught, which will give a general idea, although it was an old-fashioned, in person class. Basically there will be assigned readings for each week of the 10-week period, mainly two textbooks, but occasionally something else. The idea in a graduate level course like this is that students really want to learn the material and will show lots of initiative, rather than being lectured to.

Credit students will be submitting a two-page discussion paper each week after the first, bringing up ideas from the readings and discussions which really interest them and/or which they find puzzling, etc. Not book reports, but thoughtful papers showing me the credit students are wrestling with the material and its implications. Parts of these papers will be circulated to constitute our class discussion online, with my and other students’ responses. Auditors read all of this but won’t have the privilege of submitting papers, although I may allow an occasional question. I haven’t worked all this out yet, as this is an experiment in teaching for me.

If you’re seriously interested in auditing for this winter, drop me a line. I don’t know for sure that this will happen, and, if it does, it will probably be two years before it happens again.

I’m tempted to say you can pass this email on to friends you think would be interested, but wait on that, I’m afraid I may be flooded and have to turn people away…..